Questionable Use Case #3: Pineapple Growth in Florida + Hexagonal Preparation

Should you grow your own pineapples? In Florida? In dollar terms, ABSOLUTELY NOT. Should you cut them into hexagons? YES! Do I explain how to do so? Also YES!

Summer 2019: A simpler time before ChatGPT or even the COVID pandemic, when a pineapple could be purchased at Costco for roughly $2.50 (also roughly the price today). Even at that low price, our family Costco trips amount to once every ~2 weeks, meaning I was without fresh pineapple for a significant amount of time. So, what was I to do?

Grow Your Own Pineapples! In Florida!

Image: Twitter

Living halfway down the Gulf Coast of Florida near Tampa, it is just warm enough for me to grow this juicy football-shaped fruit at home. All that is required is that you cut the top portion off, then plant them…¹ then wait somewhere between a year or two to see the fruits of your labor. After planting many of these bushes, I’ve received two (small) pineapples in return so far.²

This seemed like an exciting proposition during the global pandemic of ~2020 with its supply chain interruptions, but it’s most definitely not worth it from a financial standpoint.³ A better option would be to work at McDonald’s for an hour, then invest this capital in a low-yield savings account at sub-1% interest rates. If you could get a McFlurry and/or some floor fries, you’d be way ahead.

Via Twitter - Note this was before perfecting the hexagon method below

Even so, planting them was a bit of fun, and the resulting mini-fruit was extremely sweet. Perhaps I could market it as some sort of exotic delicacy.

Hexagonal Pineapple Prep

TL;DR: Cylinder —> Hexagonal prism —> (6) Triangular Prisms —>Multitudinous Triangles

At some point in my pineappular journey I purchased a pineapple from Publix.⁴ After a brief conversation with the produce man/manager/maybe he didn’t even work there, he explained to me how to properly slice these tasty flavor orbs. I’ve outlined the process geometrically above, but see below for the GIF format:

So what have we learned?

1. It makes no sense to grow your own pineapples. I have no idea how Costco can buy, import, mark up, and sell these fruits for ~2.50. The price at Publix is about twice that, but even so it’s rather incredible.

2. More generally, if you want to know how to do something, talk to a person who does the job over and over, or just someone else in general. You never know what insights people will share if prompted. Or watch a YouTube video or two on the process. Sure it’s 5 minutes that you’ll never get back, but if it improves your technique at something for the rest of your life, that’s well worth the minimal hassle.

Other Pineapple Fun Facts

1. If you eat too much pineapple, your tongue may eventually begin to hurt. They’re rather acidic. Or so I’ve found. Pace yourself.

2. While ~$2.50 today, pineapples were once the purview of royalty as they had to be imported from the Caribbean or grown in greenhouses. Circa 1700 in the American colonies, a pineapple could cost as much as $8000 in today’s dollars, and you could even rent one to show off (not to eat) if you didn’t have that kind of scratch lying around.
   This works out to a current pineapple price of .03% of what one would cost in the 1700s. It’s probably even more dramatic if you were to go back and consider the price in Europe circa 1500-1600.

3. Based on those prices, growing pineapples would be well worth it 300 years ago, but hindsight is 20/20 as they say.

what else have we learned?

Be grateful for your modern pineapple access? Don’t burn your tongue per massive pineapple exposure? You’ve read to the end of this article and enjoyed it? If so, perhaps you’d like to subscribe to this newsletter. Either way, I’d love to ear⁵ your thoughts on this or any other subject that’s on your mind!

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Addendum/Footnotes:

1. I generally clean most of the “meat” off of the green head thing (as shown in the first image above) and let it dry out for a couple days before planting. I’m not sure that is even required. In fact, my neighbor Jason (also discussed footnote 3) claims that you’re not supposed to clean the meat off, and I’ve heard of them starting to grow out of a compost pile.

2. As of now, I have all of my pineapple bushes in the middle of a bunch of scrub palmetto bushes. I occasionally throw “pineapple heads” and other detritus in the general direction of this arrangement. The pineapples are growing, but I’ve yet to see any fruit appear from this location.

Yes, some of these plants are pineapple bushes.

3. Actually, the return might be a bit better than I initially thought. As a bit of a second opinion on the “is it worth it” debate, my neighbor Jason recently showed me his pineapple plants. Apparently if they are given enough dirt (i.e. not just a little pot) they keep growing into multiple pineapple heads that keep propagating.

That being said, it took a few years for this plant to take hold and flourish, and I’m told the fruit has been quite sour so far. It will likely take a few years to know for sure how this experiment turns out!

4. If you live in Florida, there is a Publix on roughly every street corner. It’s a fairly high-end grocery store, but probably not as fancy as, say Trader Joe’s or Crunchy Rick’s, the latter of which I just made up.

Publix: as in a grocery store for the public, I guess. Please pull your mind out of the gutter. They claim to be “where shopping is a pleasure.” It’s fine.

5. Yes, “ear your thoughts” was initially a typo, but I left it in because I thought it sounded funny and it could realistically be a phrase somewhere.